Biography
Mark Kozak-Holland has over 20 years of
systems integration and services experience gained internationally. Mark
helps organizations evaluate how emerging technologies can impact their business
and enhance existing business processes to the customer. Mark is passionate
about history and advocates that we move through repeating cycles of historical
change. Paying attention to how historical projects and emerging technologies
of the past solved complex problems of the day provides some very valuable
insight into how to solve today’s more challenging business problems.
Mark authored his first book titled “On-line, On-time, On-budget: Titanic
lessons for the e-business executive” as part of a lessons from history
series with IBM press. The book explains in layman's terms how to
deliver an Internet project successfully using Titanic as a case study.
Mark has completed his second book in the series "Churchill's Adaptive Enterprise."
Mark regularly writes white papers, contributes articles to magazines and speaks at events.
Background to Series
This interview was given in September 2002 with Geza Fuezery
Q: What made you write this book?
A:I was consulting with one client where the project was completed and many months into a post-implementation period. Signs were appearing that the solution was not delivering the goods and living up to expectations. Notably, in the 6 weeks leading up to Christmas the solution was hit by consecutive and very severe outages every weekend where customers were entirely locked out from completing financial transactions. The client was unhappy with all the bad press, and having invested in a solution that had been specifically designed for 24 by 7 availability. Having completed a project post-mortem the root causes to the operational problems lay in the project itself. I needed to explain to the client in layman’s terms that investments in technology are not enough and need to be supported by investments and changes in processes and organization. After much thinking it occurred to me that the story of Titanic was a good analogy. There are very few people not aware of the whole story, it was readily recognizable as one of the greatest disasters, and it consisted of a long construction project (4 years) and a short period in operation (4 days).
Mark regularly writes white papers, contributes articles to magazines and speaks at events.
Background to Series
This interview was given in September 2002 with Geza Fuezery
Q: What made you write this book?
A:I was consulting with one client where the project was completed and many months into a post-implementation period. Signs were appearing that the solution was not delivering the goods and living up to expectations. Notably, in the 6 weeks leading up to Christmas the solution was hit by consecutive and very severe outages every weekend where customers were entirely locked out from completing financial transactions. The client was unhappy with all the bad press, and having invested in a solution that had been specifically designed for 24 by 7 availability. Having completed a project post-mortem the root causes to the operational problems lay in the project itself. I needed to explain to the client in layman’s terms that investments in technology are not enough and need to be supported by investments and changes in processes and organization. After much thinking it occurred to me that the story of Titanic was a good analogy. There are very few people not aware of the whole story, it was readily recognizable as one of the greatest disasters, and it consisted of a long construction project (4 years) and a short period in operation (4 days).